On a fall day in 1999, a hike in the woods became the backdrop for a spontaneous problem-solving session on the preservation gap affecting online journals. The hikers, an electronic serials librarian (Vicky Reich) and a computer scientist (David Rosenthal), sketched out a plan to replicate the incidentally distributed, redundant architecture by which print journals had been preserved, in a digital system. They brought the proposal to the Stanford University Librarian, Michael Keller, who famously blessed the project with the admonition, “don’t cost me any money; don’t get me into trouble; do what you want.”

A recently cataloged item in our Rare Books Collection, a gift from Friend of the Library Frank J. Novak III, has an interesting provenance. The book in question is a 1533 Basel edition of humanist scholar Erasmus’s Adagia, an enormous collection of proverbs in Latin and Greek. It was issued in multiple editions from 1500-1536, each edition larger than the last as Erasmus found more entries culled from his reading of ancient literature. The Adagia is the source of many commonplace sayings in Western European languages, such as “the grass is greener over the fence,” “many hands make light work,” etc.

Carleton Watkins (1829-1916) photographed some amazing landscapes throughout California and the broader West Coast, especially in Yosemite. Originally from New York, the gold rush drew Watkins to California in 1851. While he failed to strike it rich in gold, Watkins became involed in photography and became a well known landscape photographer. Stanford has newly released some of these digitized landscapes from three works by Watkins: Photographs of the Pacific coast, Photographs of the Columbia river and Oregon, and Photographs of the Yosemite Valley. Find a sampling below and we hope you'll browse through the full works as well!

How can we best make sense of the digital strands and data that comprise a 21st century life? Explore innovative solutions to this challenge and others facing both individuals in the digital age, and scholars in the cultural heritage and digital humanities sectors, at the Personal Digital Archiving (PDA) 2017 Hackathon. The Hackathon is sponsored by Stanford University Libraries and will be held from March 31 - April 1, 2017 at the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center on the Stanford University campus.